[License-discuss] Open source license chooser choosealicense.com launched.

Bradley M. Kuhn bkuhn at ebb.org
Thu Aug 15 14:17:47 UTC 2013


Sorry for posting a month late on this thread [I hadn't poked into the
folder for this list in some time], but I didn't see a consensus and
wanted to add my $0.02.

Luis Villa wrote on 16 July:
> In the long-term, I'd actually like OSI to promote a license chooser
> of its own. But in the meantime I'm pretty OK with linking to a
> variety of license choosers.

Richard Fontana pointed out in his OSCON talk that license choosers
generally make political statements about views of licenses.  He used
the GitHub chooser as an example, which subtly pushes people toward
permissive licenses.

I was told GitHub's chooser accepts patches, and I was planning at some
point to try to patch out this bias myself and see if my patch was
accepted -- but of course any patch I produce is going to have subtle
copyleft biases -- which I think was Fontana's point.

(Fontana, do I have that right?)


Therefore, I think OSI should likely avoid license chooser lest OSI
end up in the quagmire of taking a position in the copyleft/permissive
debates.
-- 
   -- bkuhn



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